He wants to go back. In the wall of his house is a tuft of grass he wants to go back and see.

Guardian of the two stones and soul of their communion across the crack in that wall. The wall whose stones he laid stone against stone careful not to leave a space. But they found a soul and in a moment unattended a small space grew.

Saadeh, born in Shabtin, Lebanon in 1948, moved to Beirut at the age of twelve. In 1973, he self-published his first collection, Evening Has No Brothers, reputedly selling handwritten copies on the streets of Beirut.

After some itinerant years, Saadeh and his family moved to Australia, in search of social justice, and he’s been there since 1988. While his poetry often returns to a Lebanese landscape, it is also relentlessly interested in the possibilities of a future. As he wrote in the preface to his only English-language collection, A Secret Sky (1997): “Poetry is not just an expression of the past, it is an act of creation, a dream of renewal, the only way for me to recreate myself as I would wish to be.”

what matterswhichever way the branches reachis that we now have in an ordinary village whose name can be found in government filesunlike Macondoa tree linked to a young womana tree around whose trunk pasta with hot sauce has been thrownand a young woman who lives on light and waterand a window which has not been closedand a geography teacher who climbs each night to the roof of his house and burns a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitudeto find it once more the instant he descends back to his roomson a shelf without a particle of dust upon itto its right the bound volumes of the Story of Civilization and The Character of Egypt to its leftdeep in black grime what can we say about Manama? safely that it is the capital of the Kingdom of Bahrain and liesaccording to Wikipediaon the north coast of that countryand that it is a touch more than twenty-seven thousand kilometres in extent no need to mention a dermatologist who is resident there according to the testimony of patients and friends and government recordsand yet despite this despite it all

Shafie is an Egyptian poet, novelist, and translator, author of And Other Poems (2009) and the novel The Creator (2013). He’s also translated work by Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, and others into Arabic.